14 - German Romantic painters

Summary

The work of German Romantic artists consistently reflects, directly or indirectly, the new aesthetic propagated by Romantic writers, critics and theorists. The two most significant painters of the epoch, Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, were not given to issuing manifestos, preferring to set out their artistic agenda in letters to friends and relatives. Yet their paintings manifest the same tensions between empirical reality and spiritual vision which inform not only the poetic work of Romantic authors but also the theories of art enunciated by Romantics as diverse as Wackenroder and Friedrich Schlegel. Art was no longer conceived as a medium of entertainment, edification or even aesthetic gratification; rather, its function was to body forth insights into the transcendental. It was to be evaluated, not by the criterion of (good) taste, but according to its visionary intensity. In the HerzensergieBungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797; Heartfelt Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar), which Wackenroder wrote with the assistance of Tieck, art is described as 'Hieroglypenschrift' ('hieroglyphic script'). The term was topical, since contemporary scholars were on their way to deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It implied a medium of communication which employed recognisable characters whilst remaining only partially comprehensible and thus offered tantalising but incomplete glimpses into ancient and arcane wisdom.